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Telecommunications US Robotics warns on pre 802.11n products
Telecommunications US Robotics warns on pre 802.11n products | US Robotics warns on pre 802.11n products |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Thursday, 01 June 2006 | |
  
US Robotics has warned that products developed with pre-standards technology, or even rushed to market with standards based implementations, put customers at risk of incompatibility. In a statement the company said: "Products developed, produced, and marketed prior to the approval of the IEEE 802.11n Draft 1.0 specification are based upon technology that may not be compatible with Draft 1.0, and future, specifications for products. Initial testing of those 'Pre-N,' 'MIMO,' and '802.11n-compatible' products has shown increased speed and throughput, but problems remain with legacy and neighbour networks. Even early versions of 802.11n Draft 1.0 based products have shown issues with interoperability and legacy networks." US Robotics' comments reinforce a growing chorus of concerns about the new standard: products claiming compatibility with it are being rushed to market while it is still in draft form and major reservations being expressed about that draft. US Robotics said it was "actively working to design and develop products that are expected to meet specifications of the IEEE 802.11n Draft 1.0 standard. Initial products in the family are scheduled to release during the fourth quarter of 2006." A draft 802.11n standard was agreed on in January and two significant players, Linksys and Netgear, have already released 802.11n products, a range of access points and terminal devices in both cases. However last month another leading player, Airgo, which has yet to release products, warned that progress on ratification of the draft had stalled. "A vote was held on Draft 1.0 of the proposed 802.11n standard. An insufficient number of members voted to pass the draft, which means that the draft on which many so-called 'draft n' products are based, has failed to obtain approval," it said. "The rejection of Draft 1.0 by the working group highlights the clear desire for significant changes to the draft. The most significant changes required are changes to improve interoperability with legacy devices; Draft 1.0 is clearly deficient in protecting the operation of installed networks," US Robotics says it will release its 802.11n Draft 1.0-compliant products when these issues have been resolved and says that "Customers can rest assured any products they purchase from USRobotics today will work with our next generation of wireless products and that any investment they make will continue to be a wise one when n-standard compliant products become available." Airgo meanwhile this week announced its proprietary True MIMO Media variant of its existing proprietary MIMO enhancements to the 802.11b/g standard. The technology is designed to meet the need for very high speed wireless networking to enable the distribution of multimedia services such as IPTV. Airgo says the technology will interoperate with and be backward compatible with 802.11g. True MIMO at present seems to be superior to 802.11n. In addition to its new 802.11n products Netgear already sells a product range, the RangeMax 240 based on the the Airgo True MIMO gen3 chipset, also used in the Linksys SRX400 series, and from which Airgo's True MIMO Media chipset has evolved. Both the Linksys and Netgear Airgo-based products beat Netgear's Draft-802.11n products in a test run by Farpoint Research, available here. |
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